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Grenfell Tower Inquiry diary week 34: ‘Some members of the community are doing their best to spread false information’

Insight14.05.213.00 PM by Jack Simpson

Jack Simpson covers all the major revelations from the past week of evidence at the Grenfell Inquiry

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News editor @JSimpsonjourno reports on all of the revelations in this week’s #GrenfellInquiry #UKhousing

This week the focus of module two turned to the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, with two and a half days of evidence from Laura Johnson, head of housing at the council.

Grenfell council housing head ignored recommendations from Lakanal fire coroner’s report

Grenfell Tower Inquiry diary week 33: ‘Isn’t that a serious gap in the scope of the policy that was meant to safeguard vulnerable people?’

RBKC housing head failed to check if fire service concerns over Grenfell had been fixed before fire

This was sandwiched between evidence by Sacha Jevans, its executive director for repairs, and Amanda Johnson, the RBKC’s head of housing commissioning.

The 5,400-job repairs backlog

Evidence started this week with Ms Jevans being questioned.

She was head of repairs at Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation (KCTMO), the body managing Grenfell Tower and 9,000 other homes in the borough.

Much of the evidence given focused on the performance of the in-house repairs arm, Repairs Direct, and its ever-growing backlog of repairs in the lead up to the fire. This included standard repairs but also, crucially, hundreds of fire risk assessment (FRA) actions that had not been acted on.

The inquiry heard that there was already a backlog when KCTMO decided to take the service in-house after private contractors Morrison and Connaught had previously held the repairs contract.

However, the number of repairs continued to grow between 2014 and 2017, hitting more than 2,300 in September 2015 and climbing to 4,000 jobs with a value of £1.45m as of February 2016 and 5,400 by January 2017. Included in this were fire risk assessment actions, which stood at 1,000 in 2013.

However, more revelatory was the fact that some important fire safety issues within KCTMO’s housing stock were not being rectified. In October 2015, following a fire at Adair Tower – a tower block also owned by the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC) around a mile away from Grenfell Tower – an enforcement notice was served by the LFB calling on the council and TMO to repair doors and fit flat entrance doors with self-closers across the borough.

Minutes from an executive KCTMO meeting record Laura Johnson, director of housing at RBKC, rejecting the proposal because of money concerns.

When asked by Andrew Kinnier, counsel to the inquiry, why Ms Johnson had said no, Ms Jevans replied: “I think Laura had to make consideration on a balance of, maybe, budget, versus practicalities.

“And this is an example of something that would be outside of the agreed budget, and it would be unforeseen, and so the TMO would need to go back to council and ask for more money.”

“We don’t want these terrible living conditions to be replicated elsewhere”

Tuesday saw Ms Johnson start her two-and-a-half day stint giving evidence. Ms Johnson had been leading RBKC’s housing team for eight years before leaving in September 2017, and was a key person in the refurbishment of Grenfell Tower.

She was also responsible for overseeing and scrutinising KCTMO’s management of the refurbishment and its communications with residents. As has been discussed at length during this module so far, people who lived at Grenfell felt discontented with the way KCTMO had managed the refurbishment. They were particularly aggrieved with how it communicated and consulted with them throughout the project.

Residents described the living conditions while work was going on as “intolerable” and said that their concerns had been “downplayed and ignored” repeatedly.

The discontent manifested in the form of a petition signed by 60 residents at the tower, which was submitted to Ms Johnson by councillor Judith Blakeman in 2015.

At the heart of the demands was a call for an independent review of the refurbishment to be undertaken so “lessons could be learned” and the “terrible daily living conditions residents had to endure were not replicated elsewhere”.

However, this independent review was never carried out. Instead, the council opted for a review by representatives from KCTMO’s board. The review would be put together by board members and would largely be informed by information provided by the TMO and lead contractor Rydon. It had very little input from residents.

The result was a six-page document, which gave a largely positive view of the refurbishment project, particularly with regards to KCTMO’s consultation with residents.

The report said it was satisfied that KCTMO had responded adequately to complaints and enquiries and it could find “no evidence of threats lies or intimidation by either Rydon or KCTMO staff”.

Richard Millett, lead counsel to the inquiry, questioned Ms Johnson about whether she had queried any of the information. She replied that she had not.

Mr Millett added: “There has never been an independent review of the refurb, has there? At least not until now, anyway.”

“Some members of the community are doing their best to spread false information”

When Grenfell resident Edward Daffarn (pictured above) gave evidence earlier in module three, he described how he felt he was “stigmatised as a troublemaker” for raising complaints with the council and TMO.

Mr Daffarn was a key member of Grenfell Action Group, and famously authored the Grenfell Action Group blog with friend and neighbour Francis O’Connor, which famously predicted that only “a serious loss of life” would shine a light on the “malign governance of the KCTMO”.

The evidence this week confirmed that RBKC had identified Mr Daffarn as one of the clear dissenting voices and had taken action to look into him specifically.

On Tuesday, it was revealed that Ms Johnson had requested that KCTMO carry out checks on Mr Daffarn to see his tenancy status after he raised concerns about services and plans to build a new school at the base of the tower.

In an email sent by Robert Black, chief executive of the KCTMO, on instruction from Ms Johnson, he requested his officers “do a bit of checking” on Mr Daffarn’s tenancy background.

Explaining why she took the action, Ms Johnson said: “It was because there was a number of people that attended the meeting and I wanted to understand whether they were leaseholders or tenants… it also provided us with the opportunity of who was coming along and what their status was.”

She also explained that by taking this sort of action, the council was able to discover that one leaseholder, who regularly attended meetings, was in fact illegally sub-letting their property.

However, this was not where discussion of Mr Daffarn ended. On the final morning of Ms Johnson’s evidence, talk turned to his blog and what Ms Johnson felt was his “spreading of misinformation”.

An email from Ms Blakeman sent in July 2013 was presented to the inquiry. In the email she urged the council and KCTMO to provide residents with more information about the refurbishment, after fears that the wrong information was being provided to them.

The email read: “It is a matter of urgency because of a lot of misinformation is circulating – you are probably aware of its source.”

She added that residents believed that the proposed improvements to the block had been dropped and that the council had no plans to replace the Grenfell Tower playground.

In her response, Ms Johnson said she agreed that certain members of the community were “doing their best to spread false information”.

When asked who she meant by “certain members of the community”, she said that she believed in this case she was referring to Mr Daffarn.

When pressed by Mr Millett on whether she meant to imply that it was deliberately false, she said yes. She was then asked if she felt he was lying, to which she said: “I thought he was telling people information that wasn’t true.”

The subject was returned to at the end of Ms Johnson’s evidence, in which Mr Millett sought clarification on what she meant by her earlier comments.

She said: “I didn’t know whether he thought the information was true or not, but he was spreading information that the refurbishment wasn’t taking place.”

Mr Millett then presented a blog post by Grenfell Action Group in May 2013 in which a chronology of delays in the planning application are presented. The article came to the conclusion that there was something wrong with the refurbishment scheme, and expressed concerns that the project may not go ahead.

Ms Johnson was asked if she felt that the blog was making the point that there were delays to the project and that work would not start until 2014, and that it was reasonable for a resident to espouse the belief that the project may not go ahead.

She said: “It was reasonable to say that the project was delayed but it wasn’t reasonable to suggest that it may not go ahead.

“It’s a statement of fact it was delayed.”

The missed lessons from Lakanal

The Lakanal House fire in 2009 should have been an incident from which lessons were learned by authorities across the country. Steps should have been taken to ensure similar incidents did not happen again.

The fire in Camberwell, south London, killed six people. A number of issues, such as external wall panels assisting the spread of fire and failures of compartmentation, were uncovered in the subsequent coroner’s report. We have already seen from investigations by Inside Housing that bodies as high up as the government failed to act on advice given in the aftermath of the coroner’s inquest into the fire.

And the evidence this week showed that RBKC and Ms Johnson also failed to take adequate steps to act on lessons learned.

Mr Millett showed a series of documents and briefings received by Ms Johnson highlighting steps that should be considered or taken following the Lakanal coroner’s report, which were either ignored or not fully considered.

It was revealed that a summary of the recommendations put forward by the coroner was sent to Ms Johnson and other staff members in 2013.

The briefing included calls for the consideration of retrofitting sprinklers in high-rise buildings, highlighted the need for landlords to review evacuation policies and urged organisations involved in the procurement of construction of refurbishment projects to ensure that those staff members involved were adequately trained so that they understood the fire protection qualities of materials used.

Despite Ms Johnson admitting that she had read the document, she said that she had not taken any steps to address these things or ensure that the TMO had considered them.

And it turned out that this was not the only literature brought out following the coroner’s report that Ms Johnson failed to act on. She also received two documents that had been put together by the London Fire Brigade’s (LFB) Lakanal House Working Group, aimed to improve councils’ and councillors’ understanding of fire safety, particularly in refurbished buildings.

The review of the Lakanal House fire found that a refurbishment of the block had impacted its fire safety performance during the fire.

The first document, titled ‘Fire Safety in Refurbished Buildings’, provided councils with an audit tool with which they could check whether their refurbishment schemes met certain fire safety requirements. It included a checklist for councils to use to make sure their work met certain requirements, including on compartmentation and fire risk assessments.

The second was titled ‘Councillor Guide on Fire Safety’ and gave councillors advice on what types of questions they should be asking councils regarding fire safety. This included the suggestion that councillors ask if councils have clear policies on providing assessments of how refurbishments or modifications to a building may impact fire safety performance.

Ms Johnson said that while she would have received and read both documents, she had taken no steps to act on them.

Responding to Mr Millett about whether she had reviewed the council’s own policy after receiving the email, she said: “I didn’t take the leaflet that had been sent, and didn’t put together a plan about how I would use those recommendations in order to respond to councils.

“I read the leaflets and I didn’t take from them a series of actions that I then had to undertake.

“I receive a lot of information in my job and if it had been a requirement or had information asking me to do it, I would have done it but I didn’t take that here, and then turn that into an action plan to inform councillors as a result of that.”

Inextricably, Lakanal was not the only social housing fire in London in the years before the Grenfell tragedy that lessons could be learned from.

In 2016, less than a year before Grenfell, a fire took place at Shepherd’s Court in Hammersmith. The fire spread across four floors of the tower, aided by the combustible cladding on the outside of the building.

In the immediate aftermath, the LFB sent a letter to all councils warning them of the risks of fire spread across external walls and called for landlords to check this. Ms Johnson acted on this by contacting KCTMO to check the status of the cladding on the newly refurbished Grenfell.

KCTMO then checked the status of the cladding with its fire risk assessor and Rydon, and told Ms Johnson that the aluminium composite material (ACM) cladding complied with current building regulations. Phase one of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry confirmed that the ACM cladding was the main cause of rapid fire spread on the outside of the building and it has since been outlawed by the UK government.

The Shepherd’s Court fire clearly had an impact on residents of Grenfell Tower, too. Following the fire, the Grenfell Tower Leaseholder’s Association contacted KCTMO and RBKC, requesting that a fire drill was carried out at the block, referencing the Shepherd’s Court fire.

The letter said that only one fire drill had been carried out since 2010 and the group warned that power surges at the tower could easily escalate to a serious fire in the building.

When asked by Mr Millett why a drill was not carried out, Ms Johnson said that there was a stay put policy within Grenfell Tower at the time and it was not felt it was needed.

“I took deficiency notes extremely seriously, but clearly didn’t in this case”

In addition to reflecting on the direct lead-up to the Grenfell Tower fire, the evidence this week gave a bit more context around KCTMO, its relationship with RBKC, and its performance with regards to fire safety.

What came out was an organisation with long-term issues in its approach to fire safety.

In 2009, the LFB had threatened to serve an enforcement notice against KCTMO because of systemic issues within the organisation around fire risk assessments.

Evidence was presented that showed a series of meeting and emails in which the LFB provided withering assessments of KCTMO’s approach to fire safety performance. This included the feeling that there was an all-around lack of competency within KCTMO and that nearly all of its fire risk assessments were inadequate, with assessors not even checking fire doors as part of their assessments.

This was supported by an independent review of the TMO’s fire safety performance in 2009 by consultancy Salvus. The report identified 25 areas where hazards existed as a result of the TMO management systems in place and concluded that the organisation had no overall fire strategy in place.

The LFB never served the enforcement notice but an improvement plan was agreed and signed off by Mr Black and Ms Johnson, which agreed to redo fire risk assessments on all its 110 high-risk blocks within three years, as well as rectify any issues found within five years.

Yet while this was agreed, it has emerged that the organisation never really got on top of these issues. In evidence given last month by Peter Maddison, KCTMO’s former director of assets, it was revealed that by 2014, five years after the enforcement threat, there were more than 1,000 FRA actions that had not been completed. At the time, KCTMO decided against telling the LFB about this huge backlog.

Evidence provided this week pointed to an environment where, despite there being serious issues at KCTMO, there was very little scrutiny or oversight of these by the council. A number of performance reviews of KCTMO by the council failed to investigate the FRA issue, with some stating that the TMO was making good progress.

In 2016, however, some of these issues were spotted by the LFB and a deficiency notice was issued to KCTMO and RBKC regarding issues at the Grenfell Tower. The deficiency notice highlighted broken self-closers in the block that needed to be fixed, with the LFB saying they needed to be fixed by 18 May 2017, a month before the fire, to comply with the notice.

The inquiry has subsequently found out that on the night of the fire, there were various issues with the fire doors in the tower, including several fire doors not self-closing, meaning smoke escaped from individual flats into the communal areas. One of the entrance doors specifically referenced in the deficiency notice was still not working at the time of the fire.

Despite being aware of the notice, Ms Johnson said that she had not taken steps to ensure that the issues raised were fixed. She said that she had assumed that this had been addressed in one of KCTMO and the LFB’s bi-monthly meetings.

However, she confirmed that she had never verified this with Janice Wray, KCTMO’s health, safety and facilities manager.

“It’s unaccountable to me that I didn’t go back to Janice at that point because I took deficiency notices extremely seriously, but clearly I didn’t in this instance,” she said.

Grenfell Tower Inquiry phase two: weekly diaries

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